The wild ride of ‘Emilia Perez’

 

     Hints of mad surrealism blow through Emilia Perez, a film from French director Jacques Audiard that stars Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and transgender actress Karla Sofía Gascón.  

     The central conceit of Audiard's story shouldn't work at all. The story's animating twist involves a brutal Mexican drug lord (Gascon) who makes a late-life decision to -- brace yourself -- become a woman. 

    Clearly, Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) has something bold in mind, and he creates an intoxicating hybrid, a musical drama full of stylized flare and operatic emotion.  

   The story begins by introducing us to Saldana's Rita, a whip-smart attorney who plays second fiddle to her less than competent male boss. Unhappy with her status and income, Rita's ready for a change.

   A macho drug lord who's also a husband and loving father, Gascon's Manitas Del Monte contacts Rita and asks her to arrange for his disappearance, an ironic request in light of Manitas' role in "disappearing" others. 

   Once taken for dead, Manitas will complete his gender transition, a process he's already begun with a regimen of hormones.

   After accepting Manitas’ offer, Rita faces a myriad of problems. Manitas' children and wife (Gomez) must believe that he's dead and their financial futures must be secured. Rita also must make Manitas' new life plausible and possible.

   Filmed mostly in a Paris studio, employs sets that take us to Mexico City, London, Bangkok, and Switzerland.  Emilia Perez becomes a high-speed, cinematic ferris wheel that knocks us off our bearings. In a way, the movie is about the sense of disorientation it breeds.

   In addition to being well paid for her services, Rita  becomes part of the world created by the newly emerged Emilia Perez as the movie explores a provocative question: Can Emilia shed the criminality that scarred Manhitas' soul? Can his insides be reborn along with his transformed exterior?

   A skeptical Israeli doctor (Mark Ivanir) performs the surgery that changes Manitas' identity. Initially, Manitas’ move seems like an extreme way to evade capture. But, no, Manitas sincerely wants to become the person he believes he was born to be.  

   Performing musical numbers with angular acuity, Saldana commands the movie until Emilia emerges. She claims to be a cousin of Manitas' who insisted that she care for his family should anything happen to him. Unrecognizable to Manitas' former wife and two children, "Aunt" Emilia still knows how to be the center of any environment in which she finds herself.

    Eventually, Emilia moves the family to a beautiful home in Mexico City where the film broadens its scope. Emilia, who dotes on the children, dedicates  her life to locating the bodies of people who have been murdered by the cartels. 

      Stability, if not a happy ending, seems to loom but Gomez's Jessi has passions of her own: She yearns to restart a relationship with Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez), a guy with whom she once had a torrid affair. 

    The movie was shot in a studio in Paris with Audiard employing sets that are supposed to be located in Mexico City, London, Bangkok, and Switzerland. Audiard can't solve all the structural issues raised by so many disparate pieces, but there's a plus side here, as well.

     Different elements bump into one another in ways that reinforce the movie's insistence on charting its own course. Tunes by Camille Dalmais and Clement Ducol bring propulsive energy to a movie that doesn't so much bend genre conventions as ignore them.

     Saldana and Gomez give striking performances, but the movie belongs to Gascon, who embodies a character in desperate need of resolving gender and moral contradictions. 

    It's a copout, I suppose, to say that Emilia Perez isn't for everyone, but it's worth noting that the movie divided audiences when it premiered at last May's Cannes Film Festival. I understand those who found the movie somewhat indigestible and wondered whether it could have used more musical numbers.

   But for me, Audiard's audacious approach trumped many of the movie's problems. Audiard asks us to take a wild ride with him. Why not be adventurous and take the dare?

The wild and strange west

The Sisters Brothers tells the story of hitmen siblings.

Some Westerns aim to uphold frontier mythology; others want to drag that mythology into the muddy grit of reality. And some don't necessarily want to do either. The Sisters Brothers seems to fit into that latter category; it's a strangely entertaining, slightly off-kilter take on the American West during a time of transition.

The Sisters Brothers (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly) are hitmen who work for a ruthless character known as the Commodore (Rutger Hauer). But these two gunmen are not like other gunfighters you've seen before. They're more brutal than slick and they banter and argue as only siblings can.

Based on a novel by Patrick deWitt, The Sister's Brothers takes French director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, Dheepan and The Prophet) to the northwestern US -- Oregon mostly -- to follow the twisted adventures of brothers who have developed a proud level of expertise in their chosen occupation.

Not surprisingly, the brothers aren't always on the same page. Brother Eli (Reilly) has grown weary of killing people. He longs for the tenderness of home and hearth. He wants to retire. Brother Charlie sees no reason to quit, so long as the Commodore keeps giving them lucrative assignments.

Perhaps to let us know that we're not about to take a customary Western ride, Audiard begins his movie with a gunfight that takes place in the dark. Flashes from fired weapons pop across the screen along with the deep-throated sound of firing revolvers. If you're interested in assigning meaning to this battle, it might have something to do with Charlie and Eli's aimlessness. They're acting out an old script, but they have no real vision about what they might be pursuing. They're dancing in the dark.

The story soon focuses on the task to which Charlie and Eli currently have been assigned. They're supposed to catch up with Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed) and torture him for reasons best discovered in a theater.

For their part, the brothers are task-specific; they've been hired to torture; it's not their job to locate the fleeing Warm. That task falls into the hands of John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) a detective whose impeccable diction couldn't seem more out of place in this environment.

As it turns out, Warm has a large agenda: He wants to found a harmonious, non-violent, egalitarian society in Dallas, Texas, and damn if Morris doesn't catch a bit of utopian fever himself.

The performances are marked by idiosyncratic fervor. Phoenix portrays Charlie as a drunk with a quick temper and a taste for life without regret. Reilly gives Eli a dogged quality with hints of unexpected tenderness. A shawl Eli carries with him serves as a kind of security blanket, a reminder that the comfort of a woman might exist somewhere, although it's probably somewhere where Eli isn't.

One of my favorite moments arrives when Charlie asks Eli why he insists on carrying around a scarf he purportedly was given by a woman. It's not a scarf insists Eli; it's a shawl. To him, the distinction means everything.

Audiard sets all this against the backdrop of the still-evolving west. At one point, Morris -- who keeps a diary -- notes that he's visiting settlements that didn't exist three months ago. In another signal of change, Charlie discovers the toothbrush, a device that he uses awkwardly. Think about it. How would you approach a toothbrush if you'd never seen one before?

Audiard allows what symbolism he employs to crawl out of the natural landscape. On the trail, a sleeping Eli swallows a spider that leaves him sick and poisoned. His face becomes distorted and swollen with bloat. The natural world seems to be turning against Eli.

I won't reveal the movie's ending but I'll tell you that Audiard allows his movie to settle like a pot that has been taken off the fire and has begun to lose its boiling fury. Audiard has given us a half-real, half-fantastical portrait of the West, putting it on the shoulders of two brothers who only seem unconstrained by their torments when their horses are bounding across open terrain. As the movie suggests, the West may not be what we once thought it was, but the image of horse and rider hasn't lost its power to stir.

An unblinking look at refugee life

Trying to survive in French housing projects is no picnic..

If you have any interest in the world's immigration problems, you owe it to yourself to see director Jacques Audiard's Dheepan, the story of three Sri Lankan refugees who wind up living in a bleak housing project in the downscale suburbs of Paris.

To escape Sri Lanka, Dheepan -- the movie's title character -- creates a faux family. Yalini (Kalieswari Srinivasan) poses as his wife and the mother of nine-year-old Illayall (Claudine Vinasithamby), an orphaned girl plucked -- almost at random -- from a refugee camp.

After arriving in France, Dheepan lands a job as a janitor in a complex of buildings that's overrun by violence and drugs.

Almost from the start, we know that Dheepan is no pushover; he's a former fighter with the Tamil Tigers, a group that opposed the Sri Lankan government in a long and brutal civil war.

As played by Jesuthasan Antonythasan, the quiet but alert Dheepan constantly must be on guard. He knows that his survival, as well as that of his impromptu family, hinges on his ability not to call undue attention to himself.

Some of the movie deals with typical issues faced by immigrants: struggling with a new language, enrolling a child in school, mastering the ebb and flow of daily life in strange surroundings.

All of this takes place against the lawless backdrop of housing projects where unemployment runs high and gunfire has become commonplace.

Audiard does nothing to mar a track record that includes movies such as the 2001 thriller Read My Lips and 2009s A Prophet. If you've seen either of those movies, you have a feel for Audiard's style, an unforced realism that centers on characters pushed into extreme situations.

In Dheepan, which won the Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, Audiard builds toward a violent conclusion that, at first, may strike you as too similar to a B-movie helping of blazing revenge.

I won't give away more, but know that this eruption directly connects to Dheepan's past. There's only so much a man like him can take before he snaps, and when he snaps, he reverts to his warrior past.

A brief epilogue feels too good to be true, but Audiard may have decided he owed both his characters and his audience some respite from the hardcore realities he has depicted.

If so, I was more than ready for it.

Love that lands like a punch

Rust and Bone pulsates with life, romance and bare-knuckle boxing.

Director Jacques Audiard directs Rust and Bone, a romance between two people with bruised hearts, with refreshing boldness. Although some of the ingredients of Audiard's tale may sound familiar, they're given new life, thanks in part to the director's brash style and to a couple of vivid performances by actors playing two unlikely lovers.

Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) trains orca whales at Marineland, a seaside attraction in the town of Antibes on the Côte d'Azur. Alain (Mathias Schoenaerts), known as Ali, is a bare-knuckle fighter who meets Stephanie when he's working as a bouncer at The Annex, a rough Antibes nightclub.

Ali has a five-year-old son (Armand Verdure), but has no idea how to take care of the boy; he relies on his sister (Corinne Masiero) to tend to the child. It's clear that Ali is not trying to win any father-of-the-year awards. He plows from one situation to the next: head down, seldom looking too far into the future.

Into this already turbulent brew, Audiard adds a major shock: Stephanie loses both her legs when a whale jumps out of a pool during a performance. We begin to wonder whether Rust and Bone isn't going to settle into the rhythms of formula: Damaged beauty learns to live with her disability, perhaps with help of a back-street brawler.

It's just here that Audiard finds surprising success. He seems to understand that he's working with ingredients that could have inspired two separate movies, one about a woman's rehabilitation and another about a boxer finding his way back to his son. Instead of papering over differences, Audiard revels in the resultant collisions, allowing them to give the movie a sense of pulsating urgency.

Cotillard, whose legs were eliminated with skillful CGI work, creates a character who doesn't always react in expected ways. When she sees Ali fight for the first time, she smiles. She's a little thrilled by the violence -- and eventually, she takes over as Ali's manager, a role she assumes with confidence and pride.

The "romance" between Stephanie and Ali hardly has a hearts-and-flowers beginning. Ali, who never seems put off by his legless pal, sleeps with Stephanie after she tells him that she wonders if she still can have a sexual experience. He thinks she deserves a sex life, and offers his body in what appears to be part favor, part experiment.

Just because Ali sleeps with Stephanie doesn't mean that he's ready to curtail the rest of his sex life, which consists mostly of one-night stands that he conducts with near-aerobic zest.

Cotillard's acting prowess already is familiar to American audiences for her Oscar winning turn as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose or more recently for her work in The Black Knight Rises. Here, she makes a bitter beauty, a woman who's too strong to surrender control of her life.

Schoenaerts, who appeared in the hard-boiled Belgian movie Bullhead, is not nearly as well known to U.S. audiences, but he's perfectly cast. He tells Stephanie he fights for fun -- and he seems to mean it. His Ali is one of those characters who seems to operate totally in the present tense.

Best known for his landmark movie Prophet, Audiard allows the elements of his new movie to rub against one another in ways that can feel exciting. In a way, Rust and Bone is as much about bare-knuckle love as it is about bare-knuckle fighting.

Others have pointed out that, at heart, Rust and Bone is an old-fashioned movie. That's true, but it's to Audiard's credit that it seldom feels anything less than fresh.